Guest post – Living with Dick: a survivor’s guide

The light of my life has decided she wants to explain what the hell she’s doing with me. I’m kind of interested in that myself, so here’s her guest post. Enjoy.

First of all: I exist. Honest.

There’s good reason to assume I don’t exist. I wouldn’t blame you, especially since Dick revealed his history of having an invisible pet dinosaur. His mum even told me that he left it tied to the railings outside nursery, and they had to go back to collect “Hubert”.

OK, he was 3 at the time, but he hasn’t developed a great deal since. He’s just chosen a better name that “Hubert” now, and his invisible friend is a Mole Rat.

I’ve been mentioned a couple of times in this blog, and as I follow Dick on Twitter I’ve noticed a few sniffy people who seem offended to discover he’s no longer single. Frankly, if you felt any distress at Dick being unavailable you need to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror… something I can barely do any more. The shame, the shame.

Calling you “sniffy” is a bit strong, to be honest. A few of you seem to have the impression that Dick is charming and funny and attractive, but I’ve seen him up-close, and I can assure you that his unavailability should make you about as “sniffy” as going to Aldi and discovering the strange tins of Polish something-or-other have suddenly been moved. You didn’t know what they were, they were cheap and disappointing… and now they’ve gone. Somehow I think you’ll get over it.

I, however, probably won’t. You see, I’m his girlfriend. It’s taken me some time to come to terms with the fact that I am romantically connected to this man, although I think “romance” might be a strong word too.

What do you imagine when you think of Romance? Maybe some of you will visualise a Hugh Grant character calling round with a bouquet of red roses, champagne and chocolates. He stands there gazing lovingly into your soul as he declares his adulation for you in rhyming couplets, and explains that he’s decided to whisk you away to be wined, dined and soixante-neufed in a Parisian hotel, while a bevy of penguin-suited violinists play Hearts and Flowers.

Or maybe you have in mind some of those small personal gestures of intimacy that make you know – absolutely know – that he’s thinking about you. I could describe some examples, but they’re all personal to me or to you. If you’ve experienced it, you’ll know what I mean.

But that’s not us. Oh no.

It’s not that our relationship is bereft of romance, it’s just that we measure it by different standards. His equivalent of handing me a dozen red roses is passing me the bog-roll when he’s “finished”. Well, he thinks it’s finished. It’s usually around the time I’m getting started.

I don’t want to make anybody chunder, so I won’t talk about our bedroom times in any great detail. But I want to assure you’re practicing safe sex. Not in the sense you think, not with condoms or (God forbid) femidoms – it’s not really necessary to check for infection when he’s being investigated by vast teams of doctors every couple of weeks. And at his age we don’t have to worry about pregnancy, because his little soldiers have all turned to dust, or retired to the Dunswimmin Retirement Village. His ejaculate reminds me of a lizard having a coughing fit in a talc factory.

No, what I mean by safe sex is that we take everything very, very… very… veeeery slowly. His dicky hip and sciatica mean we do things at a glacial pace, so there’s little danger of cardiac arrest. And just in case it all gets too much for him, I’ve got 999 on speed-dial, and we keep a gallon of Lucozade and a tin-foil blanket nearby in case he’s overwhelmed by the pressures of inhaling and moving at the same time.

Afterwards, if I’m not too traumatised by what just happened to me (the thing that he – but nobody else – refers to as “sex”), I entertain myself by counting his grey pubes. Actually, that’s a fib: I keep my eyes well and truly shut when I’m close to his gentleman’s area. Fortunately he can’t see over his belly, so he still assumes he’s getting a wet blowjob. It’s actually my tears, and sometimes a little bit of sick.

(He suggested that some dirty sex talk might spice things up, but now he’s complaining about it. Apparently “think of a happy place, think of a happy place” isn’t what he had in mind).

In his own special way, I guess he shows affection. It’s similar to how a gibbon would show affection to its keeper: a selection of grunts, snorts and hand-gestures (often of the two-fingered variety). And if he’s feeling particularly loving, or is just light-headed and forgetful, he’ll let me have a Hobnob.

Actually he did, thoughtfully, present me with a cake to celebrate me buying my first car. This is a photo of it. He’s a twat.

And here’s another example of what all you lucky ladies are missing. Once, in one of the rare post-coital moments when he wasn’t too sweaty to stay in the same room as, he did a little pillow talk. You might think he was whispering sweet nothings, but in actual fact he just bluntly asked how many of my fingers I could fit into one of his nostrils. The answer is two. Easily. His nose is huge. It’s got an echo. I think I heard somebody in there recently, calling for help.

All of this is very entertaining, and probably the only reason I’m still around. Because most of the time, he’s just annoying, and barely house-trained. If a dog repeatedly piddles on your lino, you’re supposed to rub its nose it it. But nobody did this with Dick, which is why he still dribbles on the tiles when he goes to the loo. I’ve banned him from having a stand-up wee, although surely it shouldn’t be necessary: he’s got a piss-tube (it’s not much good for anything else), so why doesn’t he just use it? I’m tempted to rub his nose in his mess so hard that the marble tiles break, but they’re such nice tiles.

His bodily functions are irritating, but his personality is downright infuriating. If you’ve read his blogs, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what he’s like: a filthy, dry sense of humour, good with words, and constantly argumentative.

And he knows everything, which is really annoying. I like to wind him up because I have a degree and he doesn’t: but then he watches University Challenge and casually gets 97% of the questions right, then sits there looking smug and waiting to be punched. There’s literally no end to the amount of pointless trivia he can store in his vast head.

And that, I think is the only reason I’m with him: he’s pretty much guaranteed to win a £30 drinks voucher every time we go to the pub quiz. Hey, something’s gotta pay my way through teacher training, and I’m not doing it sober!